It’s One Thing To Say Our Service Is Great, But WE Can PROVE It!

The above picture is some of our group (including Quality Personnel President Connie Harris – third from left) at Staffing World 2016 in San Diego behind a hard-earned “Best of Staffing” banner!

Is anyone else besides me experiencing “survey exhaustion?”

These days, it seems like more and more companies are looking for an excuse to obtain my email address somewhere along the transaction process. Presumably it’s because they want to help me out by signing me up for some sort of loyalty or rewards plan, but in the past I always saw through that facade by assuming it was because they wanted to, well, send me marketing emails. And I was even okay with that to some degree. After all, I do marketing for a living and I understand that unwanted emails is sort of a necessary evil.

Turns out though, it’s not even that. Turns out, their main goal doesn’t seem to be to market to me, or give me rewards, or even thank me for my business.

No, they apparently just want to survey me.

Sometimes I’m barely out the door or off the website before my phone buzzes and I look down at my gmail to see a customer experience survey from the company I’ve just done business with two seconds before.

But it’s not just after a long, successful transaction. You’d think it would be, but apparently some of these companies have bots or programs set to shoot out one of the darned things every time a customer touches the company in any way.

You can’t even call or email to ask a basic question without being asked to complete a survey, and sometimes the issue isn’t even resolved yet. I’ve called companies to report a problem, ended up with no resolution yet but an expectation of one, then before I’ve even hit the ‘end call’ button my email pops up with their ridiculous survey asking how they did solving the problem. Seriously?

And when you do delete them, they keep sending them, over and over again. Apparently bytes, unlike stamps, are free.

So yeah, I’m pretty much to the point of deleting every stinking survey I get, even if I have to delete the same one ten times.

But, as you may have guessed, there’s a reason for the madness, if not an effective method. In an effort to gain an edge over their increasingly numerous competitors, companies are, as awkward and annoying as it is, trying through surveys to harness the one thing they have at their disposal, their immediate customer base.

Which brings us to our business, and the hypocrite I admit I am for having griped about surveys for the entirety of this piece only to now brazenly admit that I actually assist in the surveying of our own clients (and if you ARE one of our clients and you’ve been annoyed by one of my surveys, please accept my apologies… after you fill out our QUICK, EASY survey, of course!).

In our defense, we don’t send them a survey every time they place a job order. That would be annoying. But we do try to measure the performance of our branches by surveying our active clients on an annual or bi-annual basis. And we also participate in something that should be of significant note to any potential client whose business we are seeking – Inavero’s Best of Staffing program.

As a representative of an agency that has just have received, including a just announced win this year, a Diamond Level 5 straight Best of Staffing Client Awards, I speak from experience when I say it makes a difference in how we are able to sell ourselves and our service to potential clients.

How, you ask? Because the folks at Inavero actually utilize a management tool that’s not just used in the staffing world, but in any business that seeks to gauge how its customers truly feel about the product or service they provide – Net Promoter Score.

Net Promoter or Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction research and claims to be correlated with revenue growth.[1] NPS has been widely adopted with more than two thirds of Fortune 1000 companies using the metric.[2]

Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty metric developed by (and a registered trademark of) Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix Systems. It was introduced by Reichheld in his 2003 Harvard Business Review article “One Number You Need to Grow”.[3] NPS can be as low as 100 (everybody is a detractor) or as high as +100 (everybody is a promoter). An NPS that is positive (i.e., higher than zero) is felt to be good, and an NPS of +50 is excellent.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the loyalty that exists between a provider and a consumer. The provider can be a company, employer or any other entity. The provider is the entity that is asking the questions on the NPS survey. The consumer is the customer, employee, or respondent to an NPS survey.

Essentially, NPS cuts through all the survey noise by basing their research on a customer’s answer to one simple question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?

Customers answer this question on a scale of 0 to 10. Those who answer with a 9 or a 10 are considered Promoters. Those who answer from 0 to 6 are Detractors (This seems harsh to me, because there is a huge difference between, say, a 1 and a 6, but I don’t make the rules!), and 7 or 8 scores are called Passives. “The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of customers who are Detractors from the percentage of customers who are Promoters. For purposes of calculating a Net Promoter Score, Passives count towards the total number of respondents, thus decreasing the percentage of detractors and promoters and pushing the net score towards 0.”

To sum it up, we send our client list to Inavero. They conduct an independent survey, tally the results, then award the Best of Staffing designation to agencies that score significantly higher than the industry average.

So, how did we do? Quality’s Net Promoter Score was almost eight times the industry average for staffing and recruiting agencies. And as it turns out, we’re in some really elite company even beyond the staffing world! Not to compare ourselves with others (but we totally are gonna…)…

Amazon 69%

Quality Personnel 67%

Southwest Airlines 66%

iPad 65%

Trader Joe’s 63%

Lexus 62%

Marriott 62%

TurboTax 54%

Anything over 50% is considered pretty darned good, but as you can see in terms of how our current clients see us we stack up quite well against some of the most well-regarded firms in the country. Considering the fact that the average staffing firm scores well below 20%, those are some pretty amazing numbers!

What does that mean to us? It means that we can legitimately claim to prospective clients that our current clients aren’t just doing business with us, a significant percentage are willing to actively promote our service to others. It means that, by a metric everyone recognizes, we can stack up against the nation’s best, in any industry!

Best of Staffing also provides a Talent survey agencies can participate in, and we’ve won that the last couple of years as well. It’s a great honor that speaks to the core of our staff’s commitment to treating our talent right, because when our applicants appreciate the way we do business, our clients are even more likely to get the talent they’re looking for from us!

There’s no doubt surveys can be a pain, but this is one that’s well worth the effort. Winning the Best of Staffing award not only provides much-needed separation between Quality Personnel and our competition, it provides a measurable gold standard that tallies across industries and highlights the firms that are doing their jobs right.

So if you’ve not given us a try, why wait? Give your local Quality branch a call and experience the different Quality can make!

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Quality Personnel is the best service when it comes to caring about their employees. I would recommend them to anyone. They are very polite and are always available if we have an issue with our checks or at work.